Paper short abstract:

Based on three months of ethnographic fieldwork in the state of Wisconsin, USA, this paper examines the confines of reimbursement experienced by millions of American student loan debtors, including the gap between graduates' aspirations and reality.

Paper long abstract:

As graduates burdened by student loan debt know, the future they imagined while still being students it is a future that is not always likely to come to fruition as it has for previous generations. This paper investigates an aspect of the so-called American debtocracy by scrutinizing the student loan system in the USA (Di Muzio and Robbins 2015).

As student loan debt is difficult to avoid and rarely forgiven, many Americans are sentenced to decades of living within the confines of reimbursement (Lazzarato 2017). The experience of paying back one's debt is not only shaped by the size of the loan but also by socio-economic background, race, and gender (Krabbe 2020, Zaloom 2019, Goldrick-Rab 2016).

Ethnographically, then, student loan debt presents the possibility to think about the fluidity and dynamism of time (past, present, and future) and to consider how in time and through time, the gap between debtors' aspirations and reality may widen. This gap challenges the inherent assumption of the American Dream, specifically the potential to climb the ladder of social mobility through education and credentials.

Based on fieldwork in Wisconsin, the paper attempts to unravel institutional logics of credit obtainment, debt repayment, and educational attainment, and how these constrain and enable various courses of action shaping the everyday lives of 45 million debtors. Thus this paper aligns itself with two intersecting bodies of literature, namely, credit and debt (Thorup 2016; James 2014; Peebles 2010), and anthropology of time (Bryant and Knight 2019; Ringel 2016; Bear 2014).